_why is no more • Hacker News Board

Re: _why is no more

#121

Post by alex_c » Wed, Aug 19, 2009, 6:42 PM UTC

asenchi wrote: post #95

gaius wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, his real name has been on HN before.

Do you have a link for this, as far as I know, no one knows his real name, job, etc.

The link I saw was removed by the poster pretty quickly, out of respect for his privacy.

I'm sure you could find it, but... why?

Re: _why is no more

#122

Post by timinman » Wed, Aug 19, 2009, 6:42 PM UTC

Jeremysr wrote: post #2

I just noticed that _why apparently deleted his twitter account. I then found that that wasn't all he deleted: http://twitter.com/_why http://github.com/why http://whytheluckystiff.net/ http://poignantguide.net/ http://hackety.org/ http://shoooes.net/ All disappeared... For those who don't know who I'm talking about: http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_the_lucky_stiff

_why got me back into programming and into ruby, first with "Try Ruby!" in the browser and later Hackety Hack. When I asked if I could use hackety to build a web app, he steered me toward rails. I've used tons of his library, especially hpricot.

You're an important part of this community, _why. I hope you're not saying goodbye.

Re: _why is no more

#123

Post by timinman » Wed, Aug 19, 2009, 6:42 PM UTC

Jeremysr wrote: post #2

I just noticed that _why apparently deleted his twitter account. I then found that that wasn't all he deleted: http://twitter.com/_why http://github.com/why http://whytheluckystiff.net/ http://poignantguide.net/ http://hackety.org/ http://shoooes.net/ All disappeared... For those who don't know who I'm talking about: http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_the_lucky_stiff

_why got me back into programming and into ruby, first with "Try Ruby!" in the browser and later Hackety Hack. When I asked if I could use hackety to build a web app, he steered me toward rails. I've used tons of his library, especially hpricot.

You're an important part of this community, _why. I hope you're not saying goodbye.

Re: _why is no more

#124

Post by gaius » Wed, Aug 19, 2009, 6:42 PM UTC

asenchi wrote: post #95

gaius wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, his real name has been on HN before.

Do you have a link for this, as far as I know, no one knows his real name, job, etc.

I'm not going to spoil things, but it is findable.

Re: _why is no more

#125

Post by luckyland » Wed, Aug 19, 2009, 6:43 PM UTC

_why does as he wishes, and he has never seemed like the kind of person who lives with regret.

Re: _why is no more

#126

Post by netghost » Wed, Aug 19, 2009, 6:44 PM UTC

peregrine wrote: post #84

grandalf wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There has been some negativity about hpricot lately: http://twitter.com/#search?q=Nokogiri%20hpricot

And hpricot is the only living remnant of _why.

Well thanks to github, there's branches of a bunch of his work. I have a fairly recent copy of Potion: http://github.com/adamsanderson/potion/tree/master

Re: _why is no more

#127

Post by netghost » Wed, Aug 19, 2009, 6:45 PM UTC

igorhvr wrote: post #105

Does anyone have a copy of all the source code he published? Specifically, does anyone have a copy of his Potion ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=425258 ) repository somewhere online?

Try here: http://github.com/adamsanderson/potion/tree/master There might be a more recent one, but that's within a week.

Re: _why is no more

#128

Post by randrews » Wed, Aug 19, 2009, 6:46 PM UTC

I had a copy of Potion cloned on my machine, so I stuck it on Github. If someone has a newer one, please post it, or let me pull from you or something: http://github.com/randrews/potion

_why had a lot of projects, we can probably preserve most of them just with people pushing stuff they had cloned.

Re: _why is no more

#129

Post by joe_the_user » Wed, Aug 19, 2009, 6:46 PM UTC

wyw wrote: post #40

carbon8 wrote: post #6

Apparently he tweeted this yesterday (quoted from a retweet): "programming is rather thankless. u see your works become replaced by superior ones in a year. unable to run at all in a few more." But _why's contributions are largely irreplaceable. Yeah, software evolves and individual projects might be supplanted by others, but his contributions go way beyond simply writing functioning code.

But _why's contributions are largely irreplaceable. Sadly this is not true for anyone.

Not in the programming world, which is sad.... but hopefully that isn't the only place we live in.

Re: _why is no more

#130

Post by duairc » Wed, Aug 19, 2009, 6:46 PM UTC

brigleb wrote: post #80

Very sad. No more chunky bacon?? I invite everyone to enjoy a video I set to some of his music, and reflect on his priceless contributions. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YReSQfSBz4k

Where did you find his music? I remember seeing on his Wikipedia article before that he made music, but I was able to find very little about it.